Fake news sites are not the problem. A website that wants to control what you read is the problem.

Facebook is where 44% of Americans get their news. Facebook is Craigslist for ideas, and instead of selling used toasters they’re selling conspiracy theories and cat videos. Its nothing more than a dusty digital collection of newspaper clippings and red connecting string on a hoarder’s living room wall. Google is a card catalog with a 1984-esque slogan, “Don’t Be Evil” as its secret algorithms adjust and control what appears on the first page of your search results.

And both facebook and Google want to control which conspiracy theories you can read.

Not sure who elected Mr. Zuckerberg as Minister of Information. Paging George Orwell.

Fake news sites are not the problem. Real news sites that lie to advance their own agendas are the problem.

The New York Times, purveyor of lies that drew the nation into an interminable war in Iraq, and then Afghanistan and Syria, leading to the deaths or tens of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of olive-skinned people and the expenditure of trillions of George Washingtons. That’s an agenda-driven lie.

Every article about the Trump campaign contained fake news.Yet the media reported it as truth under the guise of “Trump said it; we’re just reporting that.” But their reporting was based on a lie. Encouraged by Democrats (and not reported to the public but for a criminal hack), the media treated political neophyte Trump as a serious candidate;when he was really just a Purveyor of Fine White Whine.

Wolf Blitzer should be cast in a new version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play “No Exit” and be forced to watch reruns of his daily, endless, breathless reports about Hillary’s emails, as if they were news. That is hell. Let NBC’s Matt Lauer drive the bus carrying minorities to the border. Maybe Donald Trump will be there to grab those two pussies.

The Truth About Fake News

What makes me qualified to write about fake news? I write it, and I’ve been the subject of it. One of my recent articles was declared false by none other than the experts at snopes.com. For a political satirist, being tagged FALSE by Snopes is a badge of honor.

It’s amazing to me that enough people wondered whether that was true to cause snopes.com to take notice. What isn’t amazing to me is that Bush and Cheney were not prosecuted. They could have plea-bargained it down to “not wearing a seat belt”, I’d have been happy. I’d have even paid their $20 fines. Just so this country goes on record standing up for truth or justice or Pokemon Go, I really don’t care. Just so it stands for something. The Smurf way of life. Anything.

Fake news can’t be a problem in a nation that believes burning bushes spoke when science tells you most shrubbery has to study for 100 years before it can even babble.

If I was a burning bush, I wouldn’t be speaking in tongues about God, I’d be yelling: “Water! Put this goddamned fire out!” On the other hand, a talking bush is every bit as useful as a video doorbell. Make mental note.

The problem isn’t The Onion, Andy Borowitz or the Goodyear Satire Co. The problem is the government.

We rely on our government of the people, for the people and by the people TO NOT LIE to the people.

We have a government that looks the other way when Russians hack one political party and not the other, and a FBI whose director verbally gang rapes that party’s female candidate for the Presidency. The good news is: before long, we will all have dual Russian-American citizenship. When did Vladimir Putin become our BFF?

Donald Trump is Draining the Swamp Right Into the Oval Office.

We have a government that uses irony to fill high office. There’ll be a climate change denier in charge of the EPA. We could have Mitt Romney as Secretary of Labor. He knows all about American jobs. He’s shipped tens of thousands of them to China. And President-Elect Trump has narrowed his finalists for Secretary of Defense to three men. Larry has better foreign policy experience and Curly has the longest fingers but Moe is the quickest to put up his hand to block.

The problem is we have a government at war with its citizens and the media does not object. So fake news sites have to object for them.

What have we wrought? Parallel Universes of Facts.

There’s a conservative universe that has no evolution, the bible is 100% accurate, there is no climate change and if there is man had nothing to do with it, America is exceptional by divine intervention, the world is 5000 years old and Hillary Clinton belongs in jail. (That’s 35,000 dog years.). Believers in these facts read The Crusader or the Washington Times and believe everything they read.

And there’s a parallel universe where evolution controls the destiny of species in a world that’s 4.543 billion years old (the same in dog years), where fossil fuels are warming the Earth to such an extent that we’ll have to shuck this mortal orb within 1000 years, and where the FBI investigates and, if there’s no prosecutable crime, honors the presumption of innocence and lets it go. Believers in these facts read the Washington Post, the New York Times and tea leaves at Starbucks.

It’s just like there are dog people and there are cat people.

So here’s what Fake News has to say to the mainstream media: clean up your act and stop your moralizing. Do your job. Government: you work for us. Get your thumb off the scale of justice.

Marty Rudoy has written for tv shows, major comedians and a former President (Bush I). He's a former stand-up comic working out of the IMPROV in New York and is now published by AmericanNewsX, The Huffington Post and an east coast satire site, What Exit NJ. Marty doesn't know why he's writing this in the third person but he thanks you for reading. Oh, and he's also a lawyer who frequently writes on legal and criminal justice issues.

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